1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to ultrasound systems and, in particular, a system and method for reducing parallel receive beamforming artifacts.
2. Description of the Related Art
In conventional B mode ultrasound imaging, the transmit pulse and the receive pulse are collinear. That is, each transmit pulse is received collinearly as a series of echoes, resulting in a scan line on a display.
However, the need to scan a field of view rapidly while maintaining adequate line density has led to the development of xe2x80x9cmultiple beamxe2x80x9d techniques, wherein two or more independent receive beams are simultaneously formed to detect the echoes from a single transmit beam. However, with such a transmit beam, the resulting two-way beam pattern (i.e., the product of the transmit and the receive beam) is distorted and bent toward the axis of the transmit beam. The discrepancy results in errors in the scan conversion, resulting in a blocky appearance, termed xe2x80x9cparallel beamforming artifact.xe2x80x9d
As such, it is desirable to correct for the blocky appearance of images formed with parallel receive beams.
These and other problems in the prior art are overcome in large part by a system and method according to the present invention. According to one implementation of the invention, interpolation of amplitude data is used to correct for the blocky appearance of images formed with parallel receive beams. The interpolation coefficients are derived from the amplitude data itself.
According to another implementation of the invention, the transmit beam shape and the receive beam positions are adjusted such that the two-way beams are as uniformly distributed as possible. In one implementation, the transmit beam is modified to approximate a rectangular beam.